![]() |
Liz Lemon Swindle |
There are some
really interesting details available about the coming forth of the Book of
Mormon. If you have some time this week,
you might consider these resources.
The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon : A
Marvelous Work and a Wonder
(Dennis L. Largey, Andrew H. Hedges, John
Hilton III, and Kerry M. Hull, Editors) Sidney Sperry Symposium, 2015
Whole
book FREE to read at the BYU Religious Studies website : https://rsc.byu.edu/book/coming-forth-book-mormon
You can read the chapter
about the 116 pages at the end of this note.
“The Lost 116 Pages Story: What We Do Know,
What We Don’t Know, and What We Might Know”
by J. B. Haws
For
more detail about D&C 10, consider the findings of this interesting book:
The
Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories. Don Bradley, Kofford Books, 2019
The
first half of the book looks at the historical information available about the
translation and loss of the “116 Pages.”
The
second half of the book suggests reconstruction of the lost STORIES based on
the evidence at hand. Really
fascinating.
You
can preview 34 pages of the book for free here: https://gregkofford.com/blogs/news/preview-the-lost-116-pages
Videos
of LDS author, Don Bradley, discussing the Lost 116 Pages of the Book of Mormon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFKhmHXYCd0 Casey Griffiths : Restoration Review : 116
plates video with location photos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk7C7zp4FO0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UmlIAyIGW4 25 minutes; intended for a YSA audience
https://gregkofford.com/blogs/news/q-a-lost-116-pages? An interesting Q&A
An
article in LDS Living written by Don
Bradley, summarizing some important points from his book: https://www.ldsliving.com/9-things-we-now-know-about-the-lost-manuscript-of-the-book-of-mormon/s/87422
“9 things we
now know about the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript”
By Don Bradley
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in January 2018 and was updated in 2021.
The earliest scripture revealed in the Restoration, the Book of Mormon’s “lost 116 pages,” disappeared nearly 200 years ago, never to resurface. But evidence is emerging that provides new discoveries about those lost pages. Here are nine of those discoveries:
1. Joseph and Emma worked together as husband and wife on the first part of the translation.
It has long been known that Emma Hale Smith scribed for the translation. Using details she gave in interviews, we can now identify which part of the text she recorded. Emma says that when she scribed for Joseph, he could not pronounce the name “Sariah” and was shocked to find that Jerusalem had walls.1
Since both Sariah and Jerusalem’s walls appear early in the Book of Mormon, and since we know from the handwriting on the original Book of Mormon manuscript that Emma did not scribe for 1 Nephi, this means that Emma assisted Joseph at the beginning of Lehi’s story in the lost manuscript and was thus his first scribe in the work of translation.2
2. Martin Harris considered the translation of this manuscript so important that he made tremendous sacrifices for it.
Joseph says Martin scribed for him in Harmony, Pennsylvania, from about April 12 to June 14, 1828.3 During that same period, back home in Palmyra, Martin missed his daughter’s wedding and the planting season on his farm.4 Martin was sufficiently impressed with the importance and sacredness of the manuscript he was transcribing that he sacrificed being present for those events.
3. The story that Martin Harris’s wife Lucy burned the manuscript arose decades after the fact.
When Martin first brought the manuscript home, his wife Lucy kept it locked in her bureau. Martin moved it to a locked drawer in his own desk, but the manuscript mysteriously disappeared. Revelation later described a collusion by “wicked men” who had taken the manuscript to alter its words to create apparent contradictions if Joseph retranslated it (D&C 10:8–18).
A widespread story, often used to impugn this revelatory explanation, is that the manuscript was not doctored by wicked men but burned by Lucy Harris. Analyzing the accounts which repeat this story shows that it first appeared nearly a quarter of a century after the fact, when it was offered by Orsamus Turner in 1851 as a conjecture alongside the possibility the manuscript was merely hidden.
Turner’s conjecture was repeated with greater and greater certainty across time. So the further the accounts get from the actual theft and anyone who really knew what happened, the more certain they become that Lucy Harris took the manuscript and burned it.5
4. Lucy Harris denied on her deathbed having taken the manuscript.
It is notable that as long as the manuscript was in Lucy Harris’s care—locked in a bureau to which only she had the key—it remained perfectly safe. That alone should cast doubt on her guilt. But perhaps the most compelling reason to question her role in the manuscript’s disappearance is her unwavering declaration of innocence, preserved within the Harris family.
Speaking at Ricks Academy, now BYU–Idaho, Martin Harris Jr. recounted Lucy Harris’s response to the manuscript theft, as described to him “many times” by his father Martin: “She declared positively that she had not touched it & knew nothing about it & on her death bed she still declared that she had never seen them & knew nothing about them & she called God to witness the truth of her statement.”6
As a devout Quaker whose every word was to be spoken as if under oath, Lucy Harris almost certainly would not have gone to God while repeating lies. What should we make of Lucy Harris’s emphatic deathbed statement?
We would do well to note the conclusions of one who knew her character well and who would not at that time have been inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt—her estranged husband Martin. He believed her deathbed statement absolutely.
5. Joseph Smith disclosed some of the contents of the lost manuscript to others.
Apostle Franklin D. Richards once overheard the Prophet Joseph relate information from the lost manuscript (described below). Not surprisingly, the Prophet also shared such information with his father, Joseph Smith, Sr. In turn, Joseph Sr. shared some of that information in an 1830 interview with Palmyra resident Fayette Lapham.7
Lapham’s published interview gives information about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon (like the correct translation order of the small plates and Mormon’s abridgment) that it took scholars another century to discover. Joseph, Sr. also gave Lapham details of the stories of Lehi, Nephi, and Mosiah that cannot be found in the available Book of Mormon text but have the marks of genuineness.
These new details fit those stories hand-in-glove and answer questions raised by the available Book of Mormon text.
6. Ishmael was of the tribe of Ephraim.
Franklin D. Richards overheard someone ask Joseph how the Book of Mormon could be the “stick of Ephraim” when Lehi was of the tribe of Manasseh. The Prophet explained that the lost manuscript said Ishmael was of the tribe of Ephraim, making the Book of Mormon peoples a blend of Manasseh and Ephraim, the two sons of Joseph.8
7. Lehi’s temporal deliverance from the destruction of Jerusalem occurred during a Jewish feast that symbolized the redemption of the world by the Messiah.
In his 1830 interview, Joseph Smith, Sr. described a “great feast”—a religious festival—in Jerusalem at the time of Lehi’s departure and gave this as the reason for Laban’s drunkenness. This fits Nephi’s account that Laban had been “out by night” with “the elders of the Jews” (1 Nephi 4:22).
Other details in Nephi’s account allow us to identify the festival and its connection with the redeeming work of the Savior. Seen in this light, the first story in the Book of Mormon, that of Lehi’s temporal deliverance, is a “type” for the redemption of the world by the Lamb of God.9
From its very start at the beginning of the lost manuscript, the Book of Mormon is a testament of Christ.
8. The lost manuscript answered questions raised in the available Book of Mormon text.
One of the unanswered questions of the Book of Mormon is how the interpreters or Urim and Thummim given to the brother of Jared got to the Nephites.10 The available Book of Mormon text tells us that before the Nephites found the 24 Jaredite plates, they had already acquired the interpreters (Mosiah 8:6–14).
How did they acquire them? That it does not tell. But Joseph Smith, Sr. narrated to Fayette Lapham in detail how one of the ancient Nephites was led to the Jaredite interpreters in the promised land by the Liahona, evidently taking this narrative from the lost manuscript.
9. The lost manuscript identifies the temple as a place to converse with God through the veil.
In the Joseph Smith, Sr. narrative above, the finder of the interpreters—probably Mosiah I—took the interpreters into a “tabernacle” or portable temple to inquire of the Lord how to use them. When Mosiah I entered the tabernacle, the Lord asked, “What is that in your hand?” Mosiah responded that he “did not know, but had come to inquire,” and the Lord revealed the answer. Then, as now, the temple was a place to converse with the Lord and seek to enter His holy presence.
The lost manuscript is still “lost.” But we have not been left without evidence of what was in it. Using the information we have been provided about this missing Book of Mormon text can deepen our study and understanding of the remarkable Book of Mormon text we do have and strengthen our testimonies of this second witness of Jesus Christ.
Notes
1. Emma Smith Bidamon interview with Edmund C. Briggs, 1856; Edmund C. Briggs, "A Visit to Nauvoo in 1856," Journal of History 9 (October 1916): 454, in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996), 1:530-531.
2. The handwriting when Sariah’s name is first used in 1 Nephi is not Emma’s but Oliver Cowdery’s. The handwriting when Jerusalem’s walls are first mentioned in 1 Nephi is also not Emma’s and is likely that of one of the Whitmer brothers. Royal Skousen, The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, 2001), p. 14. 1 Nephi was translated in June 1829, after Joseph moved from Harmony, Pennsylvania to Fayette, New York. Emma did not immediately accompany him in this move, but joined him later, making it impossible for her to have been the scribe for early 1 Nephi.
3. Joseph Smith, History, 1838–1856, volume A-1 [23 December 1805–30 August 1834], Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/11
4. The marriage of Martin’s daughter in Palmyra on May 8, 1828, was announced in the Wayne Sentinel, May 9, 1828, p. 2. The unseasonably warm spring that led to the early (mid-April to mid-June) planting season in upstate New York is described in Cary J. Mock, Jan Mojzisek, Michele McWaters, Michael Chenoweth, and David W. Stahle, “The Winter of 1827–1828 over Eastern North America: A Season of Extraordinary Climatic Anomalies, Societal Impacts, and False Spring,” Climatic Change 83 (2007): 87–115.
5. Orasmus Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham’s Purchase (Rochester: William Alling, 1851), p. 215. An anonymous local historian picked up Turner’s conjectures five years later, emphasizing the possibility that Lucy Harris burned the manuscript. Eleven years later, in his Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1867), Pomeroy Tucker recast this possibility as a certainty, and nearly all other non-Latter-day Saint writers followed suit. For an analysis of this trend and other evidence on the manuscript theft, see Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019), pp. 57-82.
6. Many of Martin Harris, Jr.’s remarks were recorded by William Wallace White, who was present for his lecture. Journal of William Wallace White (1842-1909), entry for May 15, 1904. In his lecture, Martin, Jr. recounted that his father initially accused Lucy of taking the manuscript, but that after her deathbed denial he rejected that view and regarded the manuscript’s disappearance as “a mystery.” I am indebted to Nathan Hadfield and William Wallace White descendant Corey L. Evans for bringing this source to my attention.
7. Fayette Lapham, "Interview with the Father of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, Forty Years Ago. His Account of the Finding of the Sacred Plates," The Historical Magazine and Notes and Queries concerning the Antiquities, History, and Biography of America [second series] 7 (May 1870): 305-309, in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1:456-466. Mark Ashurst-McGee of the Joseph Smith Papers Project is the scholar who has given Lapham’s interview account the closest analysis. Ashurst-McGee identifies some errors in Lapham’s account but concludes from Lapham’s accurate reporting of many other confidential details that he must have made use of contemporaneous interview notes. Personal communication from Mark Ashurst-McGee, September 26, 2017.
8. Franklin D. Richards, in The Contributor (1896), 17:425, as cited in B. H. Roberts, New Witnesses for God, vol. 3 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1909), 171–72.
9. For more on Joseph Smith, Sr.’s statement giving a festival setting for the beginning of the Book of Mormon, see Don Bradley, “A Passover Setting for Lehi's Exodus,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 34 (2020): 119-142.
10. Sidney B. Sperry, one of the founders of religious education at BYU, called the transfer of the interpreters to the Nephites one of the Book of Mormon’s unsolved “problems.” Sperry, Book of Mormon Compendium (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1968), p. 27. And John A. Tvedtnes, also a religious educator at BYU, similarly referred to it as one of the Book of Mormon’s “unanswered questions.” Tvedtnes, The Most Correct Book (Salt Lake City: Cornerstone Publishing, 1999), 318-323.
About the Author : Don Bradley: Don Bradley completed an internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project and a master’s degree in history at Utah State University. He is the author of The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Lost Stories, published by Greg Kofford Books, and was also the primary researcher for the Joseph Smith’s Polygamy series by Brian C. Hales.
One
of my favorite chapters of Bradley’s book is available as a free article on the
Interpreter Foundation website: https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/a-passover-setting-for-lehis-exodus/
A Passover Setting
for Lehi’s Exodus (CH 7)
“The
Lost 116 Pages Story: What We Do Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Might
Know” by J. B. Haws
From the
outset, one thing we can say that we do know about the story
of the lost 116 pages is that from the summer of 1828 until now, this episode
has loomed large in the narrative history of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints.[1]
It would
be difficult to imagine a more agonizing string of events in the life of Joseph
Smith than what he experienced in June and July of 1828. Under pressure, he let
Martin Harris take the hundred-plus manuscript pages of the Book of Mormon
translation that Martin had scribed while Joseph had dictated.[2] The
pages represented two months of work. The day after Joseph and his wife Emma
bid farewell to Martin, Emma gave birth to their first child. The child was
either stillborn or died soon after birth. Emma almost died in childbirth.
After two weeks, and although Emma was still very much convalescing, Joseph and
Emma’s mutual anxiety about those manuscript pages prompted him to leave his
wife in the care of her parents and make the long trip to Palmyra to find out
why he had not heard anything yet from Martin.
Joseph
had good reason to be uneasy as he made the trip. He reported that an angel had
taken the interpreters from him even before he had discovered
that the pages had been lost, taken “in consequence of [his] having wearied the
Lord in asking for the privilege of letting Martin Harris take the writings.”[3] This
nagging anxiety so visibly affected Joseph that a fellow stagecoach passenger
insisted that he accompany Joseph on the last leg of the trip to Joseph’s
parents’ home in order to ensure that Joseph did not collapse under the weight
of his worries.[4]
The
sheer frequency with which the story of the pages’ loss was retold in
interviews and publications has something to say about the impact it made on
all involved. So, too, does the emotion with which Martin Harris recounted this
story to interviewers, by their account.[5] And
as difficult as later setbacks and persecutions would undoubtedly be in the
life of Joseph Smith, there is something uniquely piercing in the pain of
self-recrimination. “It is I who have tempted the wrath of God. I should have
been satisfied with the first answer which I received from the Lord,” Lucy Mack
Smith recalled her son crying out when he learned the pages were gone.[6]
This
story has also been marked as a definitive moment in the prophetic career of
Joseph Smith by two biographers who come at that career from completely
different angles.[7] Such
was the import of the events of the summer of 1828. This we do know.
What we
do not know, of course, is what happened to those pages—or
even if they are still extant.
Other
than that, it seems that the most reasonable approach to be taken here is to
discuss things that we might know, with varying degrees of
substantiation and probability. Therefore, this chapter aims to survey current
scholarship related to this formative moment in Mormon history; to draw on
research from the Joseph Smith Papers Project and other documentary evidence to
give a sense of the “state of the story”; and to consider possible readings of
early texts of revelations that grew out of what was both a pivotal point in
Joseph Smith’s life and ministry, and a pivotal point in the development and
makeup of the Book of Mormon.
Probabilities: Pages and Plots
The
consensus of Joseph Smith’s early critics and supporters alike seems to be that
the 116 manuscript pages did, at one time, exist. That may seem like stating
the obvious, but it is nevertheless worth stating. Even those who thought of
Joseph Smith as a charlatan took it as a given that Martin Harris really did
have a sheaf of handwritten pages from which he read to friends and family—and
then subsequently lost. Joseph Smith and Martin Harris, over the course of the
spring of 1828, really had produced something—and that something
was apparently substantial enough, in Martin Harris’s eyes, that he felt sure
it would quell his family’s doubts about the veracity of the work he was
supporting. If anything, it was Martin’s enthusiasm for the content of the
pages that proved to be his undoing in this case. He had solemnly covenanted to
show the pages to only a handful of family members; it was his disregard of
this oath that was the transgression that precipitated the devastating loss.
Later recollections had Martin not only breaking his promise, but also breaking
the lock on his wife’s bureau to do so, when the pages were apparently locked
in that bureau for safekeeping and Martin wanted to get at them to show them to
a visitor.[8]
The
corroborating evidence of the pages’ existence, then, even if that evidence is
all in the form of human testimony, is strong on this point. Martin Harris,
throughout his life, affirmed the basic details of the story; Joseph Smith
recounted the story in the preface of the first edition of the Book of
Mormon—and that preface was written just a year after the pages were lost. The
fact that Joseph Smith made this story so public, so early, speaks to the
common-knowledge status of the manuscript’s disappearance.[9]
Just as
telling, perhaps, is the absence of controverting testimony—the absence of
claims, for example, that there never was a lost manuscript,
or the absence of claims that the losing of the pages was a fabricated tale.
This is especially significant when considering the principal actor in this
drama—Lucy Harris—who had the most to gain, with regards to reputation, by
disputing the existence of the pages if such were an open
question. Lucy Harris was almost immediately implicated as the thief in
question—and arguing that the pages never existed would have
been a ready alibi to clear her name. But nothing in the historical record
suggests that Lucy Harris (or anyone else, for that matter) attempted to
dispute the pages’ existence. It simply seems that such was not an open
question.[10] Instead,
as shall be seen, some acquaintances remembered her tacit corroboration of the
pages’ reality.
A more
contested question is whether on not there was a plot to manipulate those
pages. Joseph Smith said that he did not retranslate the lost manuscript
because he had learned by revelation that a scheme existed to discredit him—and
his detractors’ manipulation of the 116 pages was central to that scheme. A
tradition that has emerged in reminiscences, though, is that Lucy Harris burned
the 116 pages immediately; one writer has recently concluded that this is
“probably” what happened.[11] Hence,
in that view, if Lucy Harris really burned the pages immediately, then Joseph
Smith’s fears (as outlined in the Book of Mormon preface) reflected a simple
paranoia rather than well-founded (or divinely revealed) apprehensions about an
actual conspiracy. But challenging Joseph Smith’s credibility on that point
seems much too hasty a conclusion, one that privileges some sources while
downplaying others. This is because other early retellings of the 116 pages
story suggest that a different report about the fate of the pages was still in
circulation within only a few years of the pages’ disappearance. For example,
E. D. Howe, in his 1834 Mormonism Unvailed—a book that draws on
affidavits collected by Philastus Hurlbut—wrote, “The facts respecting the lost
manuscript, we have not been able to ascertain. They sometimes charge the wife
of Harris with having burnt it; but this is denied by her.”[12] In
addition, John Clark, a former Palmyra pastor who had personal interactions
with Martin Harris in 1827 and 1828, also assumed (in an 1840 publication) that
Lucy did not immediately destroy the manuscript, but instead planned to use the
pages against Joseph Smith. Clark said that Lucy Harris “took the opportunity,
when [Martin Harris] was out, to seize the manuscript and put it into the hands
of one of her neighbors for safe keeping. When the manuscript was discovered to
be missing,” Clark continued, “suspicion immediately fastened upon Mrs. Harris, she however refused to give any
information in relation to the matter, but she simply replied: ‘If this be a
divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace
it.’” The crux of the “plan” that “she had formed . . . to expose the deception,” according to
Clark, was to “keep the manuscript until the book [of Mormon] was published,
and then put these one hundred and sixteen pages into the hands of some one who
would publish them, and show how they varied from those published in the Book
of Mormon”—since she “[took] it for granted” that the retranslated/reproduced
portion “could not possibly” be “verbatim.”[13]
John
Clark may have, as one historian has read him, inferred the idea of a plot to
sabotage Joseph Smith from the preface to the first edition of the Book of
Mormon.[14] Yet
not to be missed is the fact that the Lucy Harris plan that Clark describes is
substantially different from the one that the preface describes, raising the
possibility at least that Clark may have had other sources of information. It
is difficult to ascertain precisely what Clark claimed as the basis of his
familiarity with the story of the 116 pages. Clark said that he moved from
Palmyra “very soon” after his 1828 conversation with Martin Harris but before
the Book of Mormon was published in 1830. He also stated that he had “Harris’
own account . . . to me” of the Book
of Mormon translation process, including the use of a “thick curtain or blanket
suspended between” Joseph Smith and Martin Harris during the translation. If
what Clark was describing as “Harris’ own account” referred to writing the Book
of Mormon translation rather than just the so-called “Anthon transcript” of
characters from the plates, then this suggests that at least one of Clark’s
1828 interviews with Martin Harris might have come after Martin Harris had
returned to Palmyra from Harmony after transcribing the 116 pages. If so, it is
possible that Clark was still living in Palmyra when news about the loss of the
116 pages might have initially circulated. At the same time, Clark noted in
1840 that he was familiar with both the Book of Mormon preface and the revelation
(now Doctrine and Covenants 10) to which the preface referred. In any case,
that preface described the conspirators’ plan to alter the
text of the 116 pages so that this altered “original” would read differently
than Joseph Smith’s second attempt. However, Clark understood Lucy Harris’s
strategy to be simply holding onto the original and waiting to expose Joseph
Smith when he published a second attempt that “could not possibly [be]
verbatim.” While it is true that Clark’s proposal may have been his inference
of the likeliest plot, based on his skepticism of Joseph Smith’s work, it is
also plausible that he remembered a Palmyra tradition that he picked up from
conversations with his former neighbors.[15]
Regardless,
there are enough examples of individuals who claimed knowledge about the pages’
survival to complicate any easy conclusions about the fate of the pages. John
Clark wrote in 1840 that Martin Harris “was indignant at his wife beyond
measure—he raved most violently, and it is said [he] actually beat Mrs.
H[arris] with a rod—but she remained firm, and would not give up the
manuscript.” William Hine of Colesville, New York, stated in 1885 that Lucy
Harris gave the manuscript to one of his neighbors, a Dr. Seymour. Hine then
remembered that Dr. Seymour “read most of it [the lost manuscript] to me when
my daughter Irene was born; he read them to his patients about the country. It
was a description of the mounds about the country and similar to the ‘Book of
Mormon.’” There are problems with the dates and places in Hine’s record, but
his principal assertion was that Lucy Harris had stolen the manuscript and “refused”
to return it; “after I came to Kirtland,” Hine asserted, “in conversation with
Martin Harris, he has many times admitted to me that this statement about his
wife and the one hundred sixteen pages as above stated, is true.” Charles
Comstock Richards remembered that he and his father, LDS Apostle Franklin D. Richards, met a man in 1880, Dr. J. R.
Pratt, who “told my father that he could put his hand on the manuscript which
Martin Harris lost, in an hour, if it was needed.”[16]
Hine’s
and Richards’s accounts are late reminiscences that should be treated
critically as such, yet so are the recollections of those who claimed that Lucy
burned the pages. In 1884, Lorenzo Saunders reported that Lucy Harris herself
had told him that she had burned the pages. In fact, Saunders also claimed that
Lucy Harris “never denied of burning the papers.” As mentioned earlier, though,
E. D. Howe reported in 1834 that Lucy
Harris did deny burning the pages, and it is very conceivable
that Howe based this denial on information he received from Philastus Hurlbut,
who interviewed Lucy Harris in 1833.[17] Importantly,
Howe’s publication pre-dated Saunders’s reminiscence by fifty years. Of course,
Lucy Harris’s stealing the manuscript—with conspiratorial aims—on one hand, and
Lucy Harris’s burning of the manuscript on the other, are not mutually
exclusive traditions; it is possible that both traditions reflect actual
events. That is, it is possible that she (or others) did burn
the pages after the preface of the Book of Mormon disclosed
that Joseph Smith would not retranslate the Book of Lehi, thus thwarting any
conspiracy.[18]
In the
end, it seems that this question of the fate of the pages, and precisely what
motivated their disappearance, cannot be answered with enough certainty to make
definitive conclusions. But at the very least, it should be said that an
attempt to use these reminiscences to dismiss Joseph Smith’s fears or
associated revelations as baseless does not do justice to the complexity of the
evidence, especially the earliest evidence. To believers and to
skeptics, Joseph Smith’s claim that there existed a plan to discredit him did
not seem either unreasonable or implausible.
Rather,
there are a number of elements in this narrative that suggest the believability
of the story that Joseph Smith and his associates repeatedly told. For example,
two Latter-day Saint historians have described what they see as an independent
“prophetic voice” evident in Doctrine and Covenants 3, the revelation that came
right after the loss of the pages—and likely the first revelation that Joseph
Smith committed to paper. Importantly, they see an authenticity in the
independence of that voice—and almost surprisingly so, in the way that Joseph
Smith is chastised. Richard Bushman wrote, “The speaker stands above and
outside Joseph, sharply separated emotionally and intellectually. The rebuke of
Joseph is as forthright as the denunciation of Martin Harris. There is no
effort to conceal or rationalize, no sign of Joseph justifying himself to
prospective followers. The words flow directly from the messenger to Joseph and
have the single purpose of setting Joseph straight. . . . At twenty-two, Joseph was speaking
prophetically.”[19]
Also, in
this authenticity vein, Jeffrey R. Holland
asked some penetrating questions worth reconsidering: “If the loss of those 116
pages . . . was simply the
disappearance of some thoughtful, wisdom literature and a few chapters of
remarkably deft fiction, as opponents of the Book of Mormon would say, what’s
the big deal? Why then all that business about Joseph going through the depths
of hell, worrying about whether he was going to get the manuscript back and
fearing the rebuke of God. He’s a quick study; he’s a frontier talent. He can
just write some more!” Then, after quoting Lucy Mack Smith’s account of
Joseph’s despair and Martin’s hopelessness when the pages were lost, Elder
Holland said this:
Well, my
goodness, that’s an elaborate little side story—which makes absolutely no sense
at all unless, of course, there really were plates, and there really was a
translation process going on, and there really had been a solemn covenant made
with the Lord, and there really was an enemy who did not want that book to
“come forth in this generation” (D&C 10:33). .
. . Which is only to say what so many have said before: that if
Joseph Smith—or anyone else, for that matter—created the Book of Mormon out of
whole cloth, that, to me, is a far greater miracle than the
proposition that he translated it from an ancient record by an endowment of
divine power.[20]
Possibilities: Texts and Translation
“Reasonable”
and “plausible” also seem good words to apply to two additional
thought-questions that arise in connection with the revelations Joseph Smith
received, and the translation work that he did, after the loss of the 116
pages.[21] While
these are tangential matters, they nevertheless offer some interesting
possibilities about what we might learn about Joseph Smith’s early prophetic
ministry and education. The first such question deals with the contents of the
116 pages. The second question deals with the resolution of the lost pages
story—a resolution that came through the translation of the plates of Nephi.[22]
First:
Do we know any storyline details that were in the 116 pages but are not in the
current Book of Mormon text? For a few years in the 1980s, we
thought we knew more than we do now, thanks, unfortunately, to Mark Hofmann, a
forger who sent shock waves through the LDS Church history community in the
early 1980s, before his deceptions were discovered. In 1982, BYU
Studies and the Ensign published the transcript of a
purported January 1829 Lucy Mack Smith letter that a collector had purchased
from Mark Hofmann. The letter was an incredible find—a window into the
development of Mormonism, written as it appeared to be in the year before the
Church was organized. In this letter to her sister, Lucy Smith purportedly
described Joseph’s loss of a portion of the manuscript this way: “On account of
negligence the translation of the first part of the record was carried off by
some unknown person but God is faithfull and the work is now about to proceed.”
Ten lines later in the letter, Lucy recounted to her sister some of the
particulars of the Book of Mormon narrative, including the information that
Lehi “fled from Jerusalem with his family and also his wife’s brother’s family
a few days before Nebuchadnezzar besieged the City and layed it in ashes.”
Since that Sariah-Ishmael sibling connection is not explicit in the current
text of the Book of Mormon, a reasonable inference was that Lucy had learned
the detail from the 116 pages—and that’s how the letter was presented in Church
publications.[23]
But as
is well known now, by 1985 the Lucy Mack Smith letter’s provenance was called
into serious question. It proved to be one of Mark Hofmann’s far-reaching
forgeries. His tangled web of deceit and murder unraveled before he could track
down the two “finds” that he still sought after: the so-called William McLellin
collection, and the 116 pages. At the very least, Hofmann’s reported plan to
forge the lost manuscript speaks to the prevalence—and believability—of reports
that the 116 pages were not destroyed.[24]
Aside
from this forged letter, there is, however, evidence for the possibility that
another, authentic Lehi-Ishmael detail from the 116 pages did persist in Mormon
tradition.[25] Nineteenth-century
Apostle Erastus Snow mentioned in a sermon documented in the Journal of
Discourses that
the
Prophet Joseph informed us that the record of Lehi, was contained on the 116
pages that were first translated and subsequently stolen, and of which an
abridgement is given us in the first Book of Nephi, which is the record of
Nephi individually, he himself being of the lineage of Manasseh; but that Ishmael
was of the lineage of Ephraim, and that his sons married into Lehi’s family,
and Lehi’s sons married Ishmael’s daughters, thus fulfilling the words of Jacob
upon Ephraim and Manasseh in the 48th chapter of Genesis, which says: “And let
my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let
them grow into a multitude in the midst of the land.”
The
current Book of Mormon text informs us that Lehi’s sons married Ishmael’s
daughters, but there is no mention of Lehi’s daughters having married
Ishmael’s sons, as Elder Snow described it. A careful reading of
this Erastus Snow excerpt does not require that the 116 pages
be the source of the information about Lehi’s daughters and Ishmael’s sons, but
it seems a very likely inference.[26]
In a
“things we might know” vein, then, details like these at least fall into the
category of intriguing possibilities, and are simply further reminders of just
how complex and layered the Book of Mormon narrative is.[27] That
complexity and richness becomes especially evident as we think about the source
plates of the Book of Mormon. It is on that topic that our final
116-pages-related question centers: Could the reference to what seems
like only one set of “plates of Nephi” in what is now Doctrine and Covenants
10—the revelation that informed Joseph Smith how to compensate for the loss of
the 116 pages—be a subtle evidence of internal self-consistency in the Book of
Mormon translation narrative?
This
question pivots on two hinges: the order of Book of Mormon translation; and
what Joseph Smith would have understood—and when he understood it—by the phrase
“plates of Nephi.” What is suggested here, by way of response, is that the
intricate link between the Book of Mormon translation work and the
corresponding revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants (section 10) offers one
more signal of Joseph Smith’s narrative consistency and credibility in all of
this.
There
are enough persuasive bits of evidence to make a convincing case that Joseph
Smith translated what we now know as 1 Nephi to
Words of Mormon after he had translated Mosiah through Moroni.
In other words, when Oliver Cowdery arrived in Harmony in April 1829, he likely
began scribing as Joseph Smith translated Mosiah, where Joseph and Martin (and
Emma and other possible fill-in scribes) had left off. One such piece of
evidence that supports this is the appearance of the handwriting of John
Whitmer as a scribe in the original Book of Mormon manuscript in the 1 Nephi-to-Words of Mormon section. It seems
likely, then, that this section of the Book of Mormon was translated last
because Joseph and Emma and Oliver did not arrive at the Whitmer farm until the
first part of June 1829, after Joseph and Oliver had already been working on
the translation consistently for two months. Another corroborating indicator is
that the estimated pace of translation would have put Joseph and Oliver
at 3 Nephi in mid-May 1829, right
where Oliver said they were when they inquired about baptism, if they had
started in April at the beginnings of Mosiah. This translation order seems like
something that we can assert with a high degree of confidence.[28]
The
order of translation is relevant to the story here because when Joseph Smith
received the revelation that is now Doctrine and Covenants 10—the spring
(probably April or May) 1829 revelation that instructed Joseph on what to do to
resolve the lost manuscript dilemma—he had not yet translated the 1 Nephi-to-Words of Mormon portion, or that
portion that we now commonly refer to as the “small plates of Nephi.” [29] Because
of that, it seems most likely that Joseph Smith would not yet have thought in
terms of “small and large plates of Nephi”—more on that later. At stake, then,
is how Joseph would have understood the Lord’s words, and the Lord’s intent, on
that topic. Here is the earliest extant version of that revelation (now
Doctrine and Covenants 10:38-42):
And now,
verily I say unto you, that an account of those things that you have written,
which have gone out of your hands, are engraven upon the plates of Nephi; yea,
and you remember, it was said in those writings, that a more particular account
was given of these things upon the plates of Nephi. And now, because the
account which is engraven upon the plates of Nephi, is more particular
concerning the things, which in my wisdom I would bring to the knowledge of the
people in this account: therefore, you shall translate the engravings which are
on the plates of Nephi, down even till you come to the reign of king Benjamin,
or until you come to that which you have translated, which you have retained;
and behold, you shall publish it as the record of Nephi, and thus will I
confound those who have altered my words.[30]
The
passage just quoted seems to refer to only one set of plates: the plates
of Nephi. However, today’s readers of the Book of Mormon are accustomed to
thinking in terms of two sets of “plates of Nephi”—a large set
and a small set. Because of that common contemporary reading,
it is not unexpected that a recent and important commentary on Doctrine and
Covenants 10 suggested this about the passage just quoted: “The two references
to ‘the plates of Nephi’ in this paragraph actually point to two different sets
of plates.”[31] But
what if the repeated “plates of Nephi” phrases in Doctrine and Covenants
10:38-45 really only do refer to one set of “plates of Nephi,”
as they seem to do at first glance—and that is the set we know now as the
“small plates”? This is the alternate (and perhaps more straightforward)
reading suggested here. This reading would give the phrase more consistency
because it fits the well-supported “small-plates-last” model of translation.
Most important, in line with the theme here about narrative consistency and
believability, this reading fits with what Joseph Smith likely would have known
(and not known) about the composition of the gold plates before translating
what is now 1 Nephi through Words of
Mormon—remembering that he received Doctrine and Covenants 10 before translating 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon. This reading of
Doctrine and Covenants 10:38–45 therefore avoids a possible anachronism and
adds credence to Joseph Smith’s account about the resolution of the lost 116
pages episode.
From
everything we can glean about the plates that Joseph Smith possessed, only one
section could accurately be called “the plates of Nephi,” and that is the
“small plates” section. All the other plates that Joseph translated from, based
on internal descriptions from the Book of Mormon, consisted of Mormon and
Moroni’s abridgments and writings on plates of their own make. Therefore,
contemporary students of the Book of Mormon understand the lost manuscript/Book
of Lehi as comprising a significant portion of Mormon’s abridgment of
what we now know as “the large plates of Nephi” rather than a translation of
the large plates of Nephi themselves. But it is doubtful that Joseph Smith and
his scribes would have even thought yet in those terms. For one thing, the
“large” and “small” descriptors do not come from Nephi or Mormon, but from
Jacob’s writings that were included on the small plates (see Jacob 1:1 and Jacob 3:13)—and Joseph had not yet
translated the small plates at the time of the receipt of the revelation that
is now Doctrine and Covenants 10.
How
might Joseph have conceived of the source document for the 116 pages? In the
preface to the first edition of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith described the
contents of the 116 pages as “the Book of Lehi, which was an account abridged
from the plates of Lehi”—not the plates of Nephi.[32] This
characterization suggests a couple of key points. First, it is not unreasonable
to infer that Joseph drew his understanding of this from Mormon’s own
characterization of, or introduction to, the opening portion of his
abridgement. That is, since Lehi’s story opened the record, it would have been
natural for Mormon to designate that portion as the book or plates of Lehi;
this fits, for example, the way Mormon introduced and grouped together books
like Alma or Helaman, even though those books include abridged records of other
custodial authors after Alma or Helaman. And Nephi himself wrote that he began
his record (what we now call the “large plates”) by documenting the account of
his father, Lehi (see 1 Nephi 19:1).
Second, up to this point in the Book of Mormon translation process—that is, up
to the receipt of Doctrine and Covenants 10—Joseph and Martin had never
translated directly from Nephi’s writings (or Jacob’s, or Enos’s) or from
Nephi’s plates, but rather from Mormon’s abridgment of those writings—unless
Mormon had included quoted passages or excerpts on his own plates from Nephi or
Jacob or Enos, as he did with writings and sermons of, say, King Benjamin or
Alma. But even those passages would not have come from what we know as “the
small plates of Nephi,” since before Benjamin’s day, the “large plates of
Nephi” were apparently kept by a different line of authors than were the small
plates (see Jarom 3:14; Omni 1:25)—and Mormon reported that he did not even
search out the small plates until he had finished abridging
the account “down to the reign of this King Benjamin” (Words of Mormon 1:3).[33]
Therefore,
if all of the references to the “plates of Nephi” in the revelation that is now
section 10 of the Doctrine and Covenants refer to what modern Book of Mormon
readers think of as the small plates of Nephi, the revelation
reads very coherently. Here is a possible reading of the earliest extant copy
of the revelation—chapter IX of the Book of Commandments—from that perspective,
with suggested parenthetical interpretations: “And now, verily I say unto you,
that an account of those things that you have written, which have gone out of
your hands [the 116 pages], are engraven upon the plates of Nephi [small plates
of Nephi]”—in other words, ‘The same basic story elements that you have already
covered in translating the Book of Lehi (“an account of those things that you
have written”) are also narrated (“engraven”) on the small
plates of Nephi.’ The revelation continues:
Yea, and
you remember, it was said in those writings [the now-lost writings, or Mormon’s
abridgement of the Book of Lehi] that a more particular account was given of
these things upon the plates of Nephi [the small plates]. And now, because the
account which is engraven upon the plates of Nephi [the small plates] is more
particular concerning these things, which in my wisdom I would bring to the
knowledge of the people in this account: therefore, you shall translate the
engravings which are on the plates of Nephi [the small plates], down even till
you come to the reign of king Benjamin.
(The
wording here is another indication that when Joseph recommenced translating
after the loss of the 116 pages, he “apparently picked up where he and Harris
had stopped, in the book of Mosiah,” and then he translated the books of the
“small plates” last, based on the instructions in this revelation.)[34]
As if to
underscore the differences between the Book of Lehi and the plates of Nephi,
the revelation makes this point: “Behold they [those who stole the Book of Lehi
manuscript] have only got a part, or an abridgment of the account [notice: not plates]
of Nephi. Behold there are many things engraven on the plates of Nephi [the
small plates of Nephi] which do throw great views upon my gospel.”[35]
This
suggested reading matters because the complexity of the relationship between
the two sets of plates of Nephi likely only became clear to Joseph Smith after translating
the small plates. Hence, it might very well have been anachronistic for a
revelation in the spring of 1829 (Doctrine and Covenants 10) to refer to
anything other than one set of the “plates of Nephi,” since
Joseph would not yet have been thinking in terms of having more than one record
of Nephi, because Mormon only included in his compilation one set of records
that appropriately bore the title “the plates of Nephi”: the small plates.
The phrasing of Doctrine and Covenants 10 thus fits with what Joseph Smith
would have likely learned “line upon line” as he translated the plates, such
that it also fits with a principle outlined in 2
Nephi and elsewhere: the Lord “speaketh unto men according to their
language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3;
see also Doctrine and Covenants 1:24).[36]
In
summary, the evidence for the order of translation, the dating of Doctrine and
Covenants 10, and especially the “plates” phraseology of that revelation—all
taken together—make for another example, subtle but noteworthy, of narrative
consistency and authenticity in the way Joseph Smith and his associates related
the “lost manuscript” chapter of the larger Book of Mormon translation story.
What is
more significant, though, for modern readers of the Book of Mormon is the way
Doctrine and Covenants 10 characterizes the addition of the small plates
material: “Behold, there are many things engraven upon the plates of Nephi
which do throw greater views upon my gospel” (D&C 10:45). It is this
“greater views” aspect—this indication of providential foresight—that adds to
the wonder of the inclusion of the small plates of Nephi, not only in our day
but in Mormon’s. Boyd K. Packer has even
proposed that Mormon’s searching out and then reading of the small plates of
Nephi, with their “things of [the] soul” (2 Nephi 4:15) orientation, “greatly
influenced . . . the rest of his
[Mormon’s] abridgment.”[37]
Conclusion: Misunderstandings and
Miracles
In any
event, thinking through the complex composition of the plates also defuses a
criticism of Joseph Smith leveled by E. D.
Howe, a criticism based wholly on a misunderstanding of the 116 pages episode.
That misunderstanding, perhaps unexpectedly, offers an appropriate note on
which to conclude this story. In his Mormonism Unvailed, Howe
misread the Book of Mormon preface when it drew from the language of the
revelation that is now Doctrine and Covenants 10. Howe did not realize that the
translation of the “plates of Nephi” was to be a new, though parallel, account
of the same time frame covered by the lost “Book of Lehi.” Howe charged that
the revelation’s instruction to Joseph to “translate from the plates of Nephi
until thou come to that which ye have translated, which ye have retained,
and . . . publish it as the record of
Nephi” was simply giving the Book of Lehi a new title: “the
record of Nephi.” Thus, Howe accused, “the Lord, in order to counteract the
works of the Devil, is represented by Smith as palming off on the world an
acknowledged falsehood,—the records of Lehi must be published as the records of
Nephi.” Unfortunately, Howe incorrectly read the preface as nothing more than
the Lord giving permission for some creative misdirection. What is also
unfortunate is that Howe therefore missed what Latter-day Saints see as the
miracle of God’s foreknowledge in all of this. Howe wrote, “Again, an important
record which had been made by a miracle, kept for ages by a miracle, dug from
the ground by a miracle, and translated by a miracle, was stolen by
some one, so that even a miracle could not restore it, and thus were the
designs of the Lord counteracted by ‘Satan putting it into their hearts to
tempt the Lord.’”[38]
Latter-day
Saints come to the precisely opposite conclusion. They see in the resolution of
this lost manuscript episode—after all of the soul searching and heart
wrenching it brought to Joseph Smith and Martin Harris—a miracle thousands of
years in the making, beginning with Nephi’s creation of a second record, and
then Mormon’s addition of that record to his abridgment (and both Nephi and
Mormon wrote that they acted based on inspiration which they admitted they did
not fully understand [see Words of Mormon 1:7; 1
Nephi 9:2, 5]). Latter-day Saints see, in all of this, evidence
that the Lord allows humans their agency, but neither human agency exercised in
opposition to his will, nor the “cunning of the devil,” can frustrate the works
of God (Doctrine and Covenants 10:43). They see in the 116 pages story a
reassurance that “all things” really can “work together for good to them that
love God” (Romans 8:28). For them, and for that reason, it is a story worth
frequent retelling.
Notes
[1] The
story is summarized well in Grant Underwood, “The Book of Lehi,” in Joseph:
Exploring the Life and Ministry of the Prophet, ed. Susan Easton Black and
Andrew C. Skinner (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 76–84; and in the
“Historical Introduction” to “Revelation, July 1828 [D&C 3],” in Michael
Hubbard MacKay, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, Grant
Underwood, Robert J. Woodford, and William G. Hartley, eds., Documents, Volume
1: July 1828–June 1831, vol. 1 of the Documents series of The Joseph
Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, Richard Lyman Bushman,
and Matthew J. Grow (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2013), 6–7;
hereafter JSP, D1.
[2] A
groundbreaking and important new book also discusses the 116 pages episode; see
chapter 5 of Michael Hubbard MacKay and Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, From
Darkness unto Light: Joseph Smith’s Translation and Publication of the Book of
Mormon (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret
Book, 2015). One new claim the book makes—a claim about the scribing of the 116
pages—has bearing here. From Darkness unto Light proposes that
“Emma had likely written the majority of the ‘book of Lehi’ before Harris ever
arrived” (90). However, and without diminishing Emma’s important work as a Book
of Mormon scribe, other evidence suggests that this innovative new claim about
Emma’s primary role in the production of the 116 pages calls for further
consideration. The bases for the claim seem problematic. For example, From
Darkness unto Light has Martin Harris stating that “he wrote ‘about
one third of the first part of the translation of the plates as [Joseph]
interpreted them by the Urim and Thummim’” (91). The quoted statement, though,
is secondhand; it comes from an 1884 letter to the editor of the RLDS
Church’s Saints’ Herald, in which the correspondent is reporting an
interview he had had with Martin Harris in 1875. See Simon Smith’s published
letter in “Correspondence,” Saints’ Herald, May 24, 1884, 324.
Significantly, that late reminiscence does not mention Emma at all, as scribe
or otherwise; and in any case, Martin Harris’s comment, if remembered
accurately, could be read as his estimation that the lost 116 pages constituted
about one-third of the eventual Book of Mormon manuscript. The same
correspondent reported that Martin Harris told him, “I was Joseph’s scribe, and
wrote for him a great deal” (Simon Smith, “Correspondence,” 324;
emphasis added). From Darkness unto Light also quotes from
Joseph Knight Sr. to imply that Emma was the earliest principal scribe in the
Book of Mormon project: “Now when he [Joseph Smith] Began to translate he was
poor and was put to it for provisions and had not one to write for him But his
wife and his wifes Brother would sometime write a little for him through the
winter” (85). But a closer examination of what follows this statement
complicates that assumption. The “through the winter” time marker seems
especially important, since the next line in Joseph Knight’s account deals
with Oliver Cowdery’s arrival “the Next Spring,” in April
1829—the year following Martin Harris’s scribal work. Hence Joseph Knight’s
reminiscence seems to be pointing to Emma’s work as scribe in the winter before
Oliver Cowdery’s arrival—that is, the winter of 1829 (which post-dated the loss
of the 116 pages), not the winter of 1828. To be sure, Joseph
Knight’s chronology of things is confused in this recollection. After relating
that Oliver Cowdery “Came Down [to Harmony, Pennsylvania] and was soon
Convinced of the truth of the work,” Knight wrote, “The next Spring Came Martin
Harris Down to pennsylvany to write for him and he wrote 116 pages of the first
part of the Book of Mormon.” While these questions of timing and narrative
order make the Joseph Knight source a problematic one for establishing scribal
order, what seems especially relevant in the full Joseph Knight account is that
he specifically assigned the writing of the 116 pages to Martin Harris. See
Dean Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” BYU
Studies 17, no. 1 (1976): 35. Perhaps most significant in all of this
is that locating Emma as a scribe in the interim between Martin
Harris’s work and Oliver Cowdery’s arrival (the period “through the winter,” in
Joseph Knight’s memory) also seems to fit with how Joseph Smith himself
remembered this early translation work. In Joseph’s earliest history, in
1832, after recounting the 116 pages story and in the context
of discussing Oliver Cowdery’s arrival, he stated “my wife had
writen some for me to translate and also my Brothr Samuel H
Smith.” “History, Circa Summer 1832,” in Karen Lynn Davidson, David J.
Whittaker, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, eds., Histories,
Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844, vol. 1 of the Histories series
of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin,
Richard Lyman Bushman, and Matthew J. Grow (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s
Press, 2012), 16; emphasis added; hereafter JSP, H1. In Joseph
Smith’s 1838/1839 history, he said that Martin Harris “returned again unto my
house about the twelfth of April Eighteen hundred and twenty eight, and
commenced writing for me while I translated from the plates, which we continued
untill the fourteenth of June following, by which time he [Martin] had written
one hundred and sixteen <pages> of manuscript on foolscap paper.”
“History Drafts, 1838–Circa 1841 [Draft 2],” JSP, H1:244. Thus
Joseph Smith’s histories seem to support the customary assertion that Martin
Harris was the primary scribe for the 116 pages portion of the translation. It
should also be noted that From Darkness unto Light, 100n33,
acknowledges other evidence in support of this customary assertion.
[3] JSP,
H1: 246.
[4] See
Lucy Mack Smith’s account of this in Lavina Fielding Anderson, ed., Lucy’s
Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith’s Family Memoir (Salt Lake
City: Signature Books, 2001), 415–17.
[5] See,
for example, W. W. Blair’s report of an
1860 interview with Martin Harris that was included in an 1880 RLDS printing of
Lucy Mack Smith’s Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet,
and His Progenitors for Many Generations: “He seemed to be still
conscience-smitten for permitting them to be stolen”; in Anderson, Lucy’s
Book, 422n179; also in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents,
5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996–2003), 2:311; hereafter EMD.
See also “Interviews with William Pilkington, 1874–1875,” EMD,
2:350–67.
[6] Anderson, Lucy’s
Book, 418.
[7] See
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 69: “Eighteen twenty-eight was a turning point in
Joseph Smith’s development. It was the year when he found his prophetic voice.”
Compare Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith,
the Mormon Prophet, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1979), who saw in the 116 pages episode a point of no return in Joseph Smith’s
pious fraud: “A retreat from the fantasy he had created was impossible. . . . Although he may not have sensed their
significance, these, Joseph’s first revelations [after the loss of the 116
pages], marked a turning-point in his life. For they changed the Book of Mormon
from what might have been merely an ingenious speculation into a genuinely religious
book.”
[8] See
Lucy Mack Smith’s account of this in Anderson, Lucy’s Book, 420–22.
W. W. Blair remembered from his 1860
interview with Martin Harris that Martin claimed to have locked the manuscript
in his bureau, which he then locked in the parlor, and to have put both keys in
his pocket before going to bed—“after which he never saw them [the pages].” In
Anderson, ed., Lucy’s Book, 422n179; also Vogel, EMD,
2:311.
[9] Joseph
Smith also briefly included the story of the 116 pages in his 1832 history;
see JSP, H1:15–16. For a careful analysis of the timing of the
writing of the Book of Mormon’s preface—based on the typesetting of the first
Book of Mormon signature—see Vogel, EMD, 3:480. See also JSP,
D1, 93, note 360. It is worth noting that it is in the preface to the Book of
Mormon that Joseph first “specified the number of pages lost.” The printing
process, as the editors of JSP, D1 suggest, might thus also offer a
clue to the source of the number “116”: “This page count may be an
approximation based on the page numbering found on the printer’s manuscript of
the Book of Mormon. The top of page 117 in that copy marks the beginning of the
book of Mosiah, which corresponds to the end of the period covered in the pages
lost by Harris.” It is possible, though, that the numbering reflected what had
been retained of the original pagination, since the editors of D1 note, “The
process of preparing the printer’s manuscript and providing portions to the
typesetter suggests that the printer’s manuscript may not have comprised 116
pages by the time JS wrote the preface.” Historical Introduction to Preface to
the Book of Mormon, circa August 1829, in JSP, D1: 92–93. Compare
Dan Vogel’s analysis of the page numbering in Vogel, EMD,
3:480–481.
[10] John
Clark, a former Palmyra pastor who had personal interactions with Martin Harris
in 1827 and 1828, reported that, from very early on, Lucy Harris was the chief
suspect in this drama—yet Clark’s account (published in 1840) only had Lucy
“[refusing] to give any information in relation to the matter.” As Clark
portrayed it, Lucy did not deny anything; yet Clark, and others, still assumed
Lucy Harris was the guilty party. See “Martin Harris Interviews with John A.
Clark, 1827 & 1828,” in Vogel, EMD, 2:269. In the affidavit
Lucy Harris gave to Philastus Hurlbut in 1833, she spoke strongly against
Joseph Smith’s work and her husband’s involvement—“the delusion of Mormonism,”
she called it—yet she did not mention the well-publicized 116 pages story. In
Vogel, EMD, 2:36.
[11] See
Vogel, EMD, 2:270, note 26; also 3:480–481. See also Linda Sillitoe
and Allen Roberts, Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders,
2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), 154–55, where they report that
investigators in the Mark Hofmann forgery case met a descendant of Martin
Harris who told investigators that her family tradition was that Lucy Harris
burned the pages.
[12] E.
D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, Ohio: E. D. Howe,
1834), 22. The preface to the first edition of the Book of Mormon is reprinted
in “Preface to Book of Mormon, circa August 1829,” in JSP,
D1:93–94.
[13] Vogel, EMD,
2:269–270.
[14] For
Dan Vogel’s opinion that John Clark’s account is based on an “inference taken
from the Book of Mormon’s preface, rather than any of the principals in the
affair,” see Vogel, EMD, 2:270n26.
[15] Vogel, EMD,
2:268–269; see also Dan Vogel’s analysis of John Clark’s movements based on
census records, in Vogel, EMD 2:260. For a helpful analysis of
statements by those who remembered a curtain/sheet hung between Joseph Smith
and his scribe—and for an analysis of how that might affect questions of timing
in the narrative of translation, see MacKay and Dirkmaat, From Darkness
unto Light, 91, and 100, notes 34–36.
[16] John
Clark, in Vogel, EMD, 2:270; William Hine, circa March 1885, in
Vogel, EMD, 4:185–186; Charles Comstock Smith’s account is reported
in Vogel, EMD, 3:481. Recently, author Brant Gardner has also
speculated that the “verbatim” issue might have been at the heart of the Lord’s
instruction not to retranslate the Book of Lehi, but Gardner comes at it from a
different perspective, one based on what has been called a “loose” translation
model: “Why didn’t Joseph simply retranslate it? Ultimately, we have no answer
other than the one Joseph gave, but there is another possibility. On some
level, Joseph may have understood that he could not translate the same document
twice in the same way, not because he lacked divine inspiration, but because
the very nature of that inspiration produced a translation that was only a
functional equivalent of the inspired meaning.” In The Gift and Power:
Translating the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books,
2011), 285. However, a number of Joseph Smith’s associates remembered a Book of
Mormon translation process where the verbiage revealed to Joseph Smith was more
tightly controlled. See the extensive accounts compiled in John W. Welch, “The
Miraculous Translation of the Book of Mormon,” in Opening the Heavens:
Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, UT:
Brigham Young University Press; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 77–213.
[17] Lorenzo
Saunders Interview, November 12, 1884, in Vogel, EMD, 2:149. On E.
D. Howe and Philastus Hurlbut, see Dan Vogel’s analysis in Vogel, EMD,
3:480. There is no mention in Lucy Harris’s written affidavit of the 116 pages
story, but that does not preclude the possibility that she and Hurlbut
discussed the well-known story. See Vogel, EMD, 2:36.
[18] This
could be reflected in William Pilkington’s accounts of his interviews with
Martin Harris that show Martin considering both traditions concerning the fate
of the pages. Pilkington remembered, in a 1934 affidavit, that Martin Harris
“believed his Wife burned it up,” and then one paragraph later Pilkington
reported that “[Harris’] Wife took the manuscript and he never saw it any more.
So you see Willie, it was stolen from me.” In “Interviews with William
Pilkington, 1874–1875,” in Vogel, EMD, 2:354. It is worth noting
that in an autobiography Pilkington composed four years later, he only
recounted the theft thesis. Pilkington said, “She [Lucy Harris] took the
manuscript from him and she was perusing them when someone jerked them from
her, and then another got it, and Martin told me it disappeared, and he never
saw it any more.” In “Interviews with William Pilkington, 1874–1875,” in
Vogel, EMD, 2:361–362). Lorenzo Saunders did not suggest the timing
for the burning of the pages in his reminiscence, but James Reeves did in his
1872 account. Reeves suggested that Lucy Harris had burned the pages even
before Martin Harris realized they were gone. However, Reeves’s account is
problematic (as are most of these late reminiscences) because it pictures
Martin Harris “during the long winter evenings .
. . [sitting] by the great open fire-place and [studying] his new
text stopping now and then to pour a little inspiration into the ear of Aunt
Dolly, who usually answered by telling him to ‘shut up.’” Martin Harris, of
course, had the pages during the summer of 1828. See “James H. Reeves Account,
1872,” in Vogel, EMD, 2:342.
[19] Bushman, Rough
Stone Rolling, 69. See also Philip L. Barlow, Mormons and the
Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion, updated ed.
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22–25.
[20] Jeffrey
R. Holland, “A Standard unto My People,” Eighteenth Annual Church Educational
System Religious Educators Symposium, August 9, 1994, 5–6.
[21] One
possibility is that the mechanics of translation changed after the loss of the
Book of Lehi manuscript. When Joseph resumed the translation, a curtain no
longer was used to separate Joseph from his scribe; instead, the plates stayed
on the table, covered by a cloth. And witnesses remembered him using a single
seer stone more than the interpreters. See Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling,
71–72, for a summary of these recollections.
[22] See
Richard E. Bennett, “Joseph Smith and the First Principles of the Gospel,
1820–1829,” in Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer, ed. Richard
Neitzel Holzapfel and Kent P. Jackson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center,
Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2010), 23–50, for
insightful commentary on the lessons Joseph Smith learned during and after the
116 pages episode.
[23] Dean
C. Jessee, “Lucy Mack Smith’s 1829 Letter to Mary Smith Pierce,” BYU
Studies 22, no. 4 (Fall 1982): 461; see also “1829 Lucy Mack Smith
Letter Displayed,” Ensign, October 1982, 70–73, which appeared
under this descriptive heading: “Discusses information apparently from ‘lost
116 pages’—including Ishmael as Sariah’s brother.”
[24] See
Richard E. Turley, Jr., Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann
Case (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 58–67,
271, 318; Sillitoe and Roberts, Salamander: The Story of the Mormon
Forgery Murders, 154–155, 534.
[25] It
is not unlikely that the Erastus Snow quote discussed in this paragraph served
as the inspiration for the information Mark Hofmann included in his forged Lucy
Mack Smith letter.
[26] Erastus
Snow, in Journal of Discourses (London: Latter-day Saints’
Book Depot, 1883), 23:184.
[27] Recently,
historian Don Bradley has proposed that there may be lingering textual echoes
of Book of Lehi content in the current Book of Mormon, as well. These include
things like the identity of Aminadi, an ancestor of Amulek, whose appearance in
the Book of Mormon is so brief as to imply that Mormon, as narrator, assumed
readers would already know about Aminadi; or the story of how the Jaredite interpreters
came into the hands of Nephite seers, something not spelled out in the current
text of the Book of Mormon, but hinted at in the recollections of Fayette
Lapham, who recounted a conversation on that topic with Joseph Smith Sr. See
Don Bradley, “Piercing the Veil: Temple Worship in the Lost 116 Pages,” paper
presented at the 2012 FairMormon Conference, http://www.fairmormon.org/perspectives/fair-conferences/2012-fair-conference/2012-piercing-the-veil-temple-worship-in-the-lost-116-pages.
Bradley has a forthcoming book on the 116 pages from Greg Kofford Books.
[28] For
a helpful summary of this, see Historical Introduction to “Book of Mormon
Manuscript Excerpt, circa June 1829 [1 Nephi 2:2b–3:18a],” in JSP,
D1:59–60. See also the translation order and dating analysis in Richard L.
Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 223n67.
[29] For
the dating of the revelation that is now Doctrine and Covenants 10—and the
possibility that it is a composite revelation that was ultimately composed in
April or May 1829—see Historical Introduction to Revelation, Spring 1829,
in JSP, D1:38–39.
[30] The
revelation (the 1833 Book of Commandments version quoted here) is reproduced in
Revelation, Spring 1829, in JSP, D1:40–42 [D&C 10].
[31] The
quote comes from JSP, D1:42n93. The reading proposed here is an
alternate reading from that suggested in the D1 footnote.
[32] Historical
Introduction to Preface to the Book of Mormon, circa August 1829, in JSP,
D1:93; emphasis added.
[33] For
a helpful discussion (and accompanying chart) of the custodians of Nephi’s two
sets of plates, see David Rolph Seely, “Plates of Nephi,” in Book of
Mormon Reference Companion, ed. Dennis L. Largey (Salt Lake City: Deseret
Book, 2003), 645–647.
[34] JSP,
H1:38.
[35] Revelation,
Spring 1829, in JSP, D1:40–41 [D&C 10]. The passages quoted
here correspond with Doctrine and Covenants 10:38–44. While the pages that
contained most of what is now Doctrine and Covenants 10, in an earlier
manuscript form, are missing from the “Book of Commandments and Revelations”
(“Revelation Book 1” in the Joseph Smith Papers’ designation), the manuscript
page with the last part of the revelation (beginning with what corresponds now
Doctrine and Covenants 10:42) is extant in the manuscript Revelation Book 1.
See Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper, eds., Revelations
and Translations: Manuscript Revelation Books, Facsimile edition, Joseph
Smith Papers, ed. Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman
Bushman (Salt Lake City: The Church Historian’s Press, 2009), 13. It is worth
noting that without knowing the contents of the 116 lost pages, it is
impossible to know to what extent Mormon might have included information about
Nephi’s creation of a second set of plates. This part of the revelation
(Doctrine and Covenants 10) suggests that the Book of Lehi at least alluded to
the small plates of Nephi: “It was said in those writings that a more
particular account was given of these things upon the plates of Nephi.” Thus it
is possible that this mention of the “more particular account” might have been
the impetus behind Mormon’s searching out the small plates of Nephi. But it is
telling that the allusion is only to “the plates of Nephi” rather
than a specific set of Nephi’s plates.
[36] It
is also worth noting that Mormon does not refer to what we
know as the “small plates” as the “plates of Nephi” in Words of Mormon; he
calls them simply “these plates” (see Words of Mormon 1:3–5, 9, 10). Mormon
seems to reserve the descriptor “plates of Nephi” for the “large plates.” Thus,
the phrasing of Doctrine and Covenants 10 seems tailored to Joseph Smith’s
understanding, which was different than Mormon’s understanding or terminology.
[37] Boyd
K. Packer, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled (Salt Lake City:
Bookcraft, 1991), 276.
[38] Howe, Mormonism
Unvailed, 22–23.
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